“What remarkable talent the dear child has!”

The young girl had, then, a positive influence; and it was to her entreaties alone, and not to those of his wife, that he had several times forgiven Maxence.  He would have done much more for her, had she wished it; but she would have been compelled to ask, to insist, to beg.

“And it’s humiliating,” she used to say.

Sometimes Mme. Favoral scolded her gently, saying that her father would certainly not refuse her one of those pretty toilets which are the ambition and the joy of young girls.

But she: 

“It is much less mortification to me to wear these rags than to meet with a refusal,” she replied.  “I am satisfied with my dresses.”

With such a character, surrounded, however, by a meek resignation, and an unalterable sang-froid, she inspired a certain respect to both her mother and her brother, who admired in her an energy of which they felt themselves incapable.

And when she appeared, and commenced reproaching him in an indignant tone of voice, with the baseness of his conduct, and his insatiate demands, Maxence was almost stunned.

“I did not know,” he commenced, turning as red as fire.

She crushed him with a look of mingled contempt and pity; and, in an accent of haughty irony: 

“Indeed,” she said, “you do not know whence the money comes that you extort from our mother!”

And holding up her hand, still remarkably handsome, though slightly deformed by the constant handling of the needle; the fourth finger of the right hand bent by the thread, and the fore-finger of the left tattooed and lacerated by the needle: 

“Indeed,” she repeated, “you do not know that my mother and myself, we spend all our days, and the greater part of our nights, working?”

Hanging his head, he said nothing.

“If it were for myself alone,” she continued, “I would not speak to you thus.  But look at our mother!  See her poor eyes, red and weak from her ceaseless labor!  If I have said nothing until now, it is because I did not as yet despair of your heart; because I hoped that you would recover some feeling of decency.  But no, nothing.  With time, your last scruples seem to have vanished.  Once you begged humbly; now you demand rudely.  How soon will you resort to blows?”

“Gilberte!” stammered the poor fellow, “Gilberte!”

She interrupted him: 

“Money!” she went on, “always, and without time, you must have money; no matter whence it comes, nor what it costs.  If, at least, you had to justify your expenses, the excuse of some great passion, or of some object, were it absurd, ardently pursued!  But I defy you to confess upon what degrading pleasures you lavish our humble economies.  I defy you to tell us what you mean to do with the sum that you demand to-night,—­that sum for which you would have our mother stoop to beg the assistance of a shop-keeper, to whom we would be compelled to reveal the secret of our shame.”